Reply #74: We had thousands of mercenaries in Vietnam even with a draft [View All]

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=7855

<snip>Vinnell's Asian adventures served as a springboard for its emergence as a global company that was more than willing to do a little intelligence work on the side if the opportunity presented itself. In his memoir Ropes of Sand, former CIA operative Wilbur Crane Eveland describes how he used his Vinnell connection as a cover during his tours of duty in Africa and the Middle East in the early 1960s, noting that company founder Albert Vinnell expressed his willingness to help the agency do whatever it needed to do (for a fee, of course). Eveland returned the favor by negotiating contracts for Vinnell to do construction services on oil fields in Iran and Libya, bribing the appropriate officials along the way.

Vinnell's big break in the military/intelligence field came during the American intervention in Vietnam, when the company won hundreds of millions of dollars of business doing everything from building military bases to repairing armored personnel carriers to running military warehouses. At the peak of its involvement Vinnell had 5,000 employees in Vietnam, but not all of them were engaged in straightforward military operations. Several retired Army and Marine officers familiar with Vinnell's work in Vietnam have indicated that the company ran several "black" (secret) programs. In a March 1975 interview with the Village Voice, a Pentagon official described Vinnell as "our own little mercenary army in Vietnam" and asserted that "we used them to do things we either didn't have the manpower to do ourselves, or because of legal problems." The official indicated that one of Vinnell's jobs was as "rear security forces," assigned to "clean up" U.S. military bases in Vietnam during the U.S. withdrawal: "how they 'cleaned up' was pretty much up to them.... If we figured an area was certain to be overrun by the VC .... they were to demolish everything and anything."



http://www.nnn.se/levande/lessons1.htm

The first U.S. helicopters arrived in 1961, carrying death and destruction. Thousands more were to follow.


Lessons of the Vietnam War: Part I

Back to the Stone Age

By Edward S. Herman

The United States has used its enormous military superiority with great ruthlessness in the post-World War II era. During the Vietnam War, it dropped more bombs on the Indochinese peninsula than were employed by all sides during World War II. The U.S. also employed vast quantities of the cruellest weaponry, including phosphorus and fragmentation bombs, napalm, and chemicals that damage humans while killing vegetation.

The U.S. attack on Vietnam was one of the great holocausts of our time. But since it was perpetrated by the United States, it is not regarded as such. It may therefore be useful to review the basic facts of the war and its long-term consequences. snip

The U.S. ignored the Geneva Accords, the rights of the Vietnamese, and the U.N. Charter by installing a dictator of its choice in what came to be known as South Vietnam. Southern puppet

The U.S. invasion force of 500,000 troops was supplemented by mercenaries from South Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, and Australia. Their assigned task was to "pacify" the country, which they did by carrying out merciless "search and destroy" operations in which domestic animals and crops were destroyed, villages burned down, and large numbers of innocent people were raped, killed and made homeless. It was soon discovered that the "enemy" had deep roots among the people, who were therefore treated as enemies. snip

The Vietnamese enemy was quickly labelled ”terrorist” and aggressor-- allegedly committing "internal aggression"-- and was effectively demonized. The media averted their eyes from all but a minuscule fraction of the enormous U.S. violence, focusing instead on the relatively minor and more selective acts of the "terrorists." This helped make the almost unlimited use of force and high-tech warfare against the distant peasant society acceptable.